Hello and welcome to my blog. Ever since I was young I had been interested in making money. When I was eight years old, I opened a bank account, with my parents, of course and started to make a minimal amount of interest on my money. As I grew older I became frusterated at how slowly my money grew in my savings account. My mom suggested, having been a long time daytrader of Gilead Sciences (Gild), to invest my money in Gilead. This was around 5 years ago in 2004. I agreed and so my Mom put my 400 dollars or so that I had accumulated over the years in tdameritrade. She bought as many shares as she could of Gilead with my 400 dollars. So, over the years that 400 dollars grew as the share price went up. Also along the way, I added to that 400 dollars with my birthday money and Christmas money and my allowance money. I saved, saved, saved while other children spent,spent, spent. Over about 4 years my money grew to about 4000, not bad for a 14 year old. At this time I was starting to think of ways to make even more money. Gilead was getting just too slow for me. So I starting trading other companies. I would hold for just a couple days or a couple weeks a longest and then sell, hoping for a profit.
I traded everything from Microsoft to Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers. I was doing pretty well. I average about 200 dollars a week. Not bad for a 14 year old. I started getting greedy though. I bought a stock called Inca Brands (idgi). This was a huge mistake. The day after I bought IDGI I could have sold for a 500 dollar profit, but I thought it would go higher. I held. It started to go lower and lower. I just figured it would go back up. It never did. I sold a couple weeks later for a loss of 4000 dollars, I was devasted. I stopped trading. I needed to rethink my trading strategy. So I thought about the past couple months, and why had so much success and then a huge failure. The answer was me getting greedy. I had read time and time again in all sorts of stock trading books, "Pigs get Fat, Hogs get Slaughtered", but I failed to heed the warning. That was were I had gone wrong. Since then, I have started to recover, not taking as much risk. Last Christmas, all I asked for was money to put in my TdAmeritrade account. I recieved about 1800 dollars in total from Christmas and my Birthday (Dec. 29th). Since then I have made a promise to myself to set stop limits and such to limit my losses. I made 130 dollars, buying GNTA at .0050 and selling at .0055, when i could have sold at .007. Oh well. You take what you can get.
So thats my background history and what has inspired me to right a stock trading journal through the eyes of a 15 year old. I will be talking about everything from my personal trading, to the overall market, to individual stocks.
